Wiki

Wikis, by design, thrive on collaboration.

ArchWiki is a community documentation process. The contents are created by the community for the community. Contributors volunteer their time and energy to share their knowledge and skill with the community. All users are encouraged to contribute. Tasks on ArchWiki can roughly be divided into the following:

In the long run, the goal is a professional and easily-navigated wiki, such that supplementary guides, documenters, etc. are unnecessary. This is a community effort, but wiki maintenance is often a tedious and thankless task. If you take on the task seriously, a formal position as a wiki maintainer may be in order. This gives the job purpose and recognition.

Bugs

Opening (and closing) bug reports on the Arch Linux Bug Tracker is one of the possible ways to help the community. However, ineffective use of the bug-tracker can be counter-productive instead of being useful. This article will guide anyone wanting to help the community efficiently by reporting or hunting bugs.

AUR

The Arch User Repository is a community-driven repository of PKGBUILDs for Arch users. Packages in the AUR are built by the PKGBUILDs and are not pre-built binaries like from the official repositories. The AUR was created to organize and share new packages from the community and to help expedite popular packages' inclusion into the [community] repository.

Community projects

Arch has a vital and active community of software developers and contributing projects. If you have a project you would like to link to, this is a great place to do it. Include a link to your project, the date your project started, and a brief (one or two sentence) description of your project.

Note: All projects listed here are community projects. None of these projects are considered official Arch projects.

namcap is an utility for Arch Linux which helps in automatic detection of common mistakes and errors in PKGBUILDs. This page is an automatically generated report obtained after running namcap against the [core], [extra] and [community] trees.

As a developer...

Firstly, remember that the main motivation for your work on Arch should be helping the whole community, and not trying to become an "Arch developer" by any means. Secondly, you are also part of the community; to provide help to others means you will also help yourself.

What can I do?

Here is a list, in no particular order, of things that you may want to do in order to make yourself useful to the community:

Establish a reputation as being helpful by offering assistance whenever possible

Answer questions on the forum, IRC, and mailing lists

Join the Trusted Users to gain packaging experience to show your skills

Submit packages to the AUR

Join one of the offshoot projects that may be incorporated into Arch mainstream someday, or start your own

Work on pacman, makepkg, initscripts, or other source code and submit patches to the bug tracker

Traverse the bug tracker and fix existing bugs

Find and submit new bugs

Fix wiki errors, add new pages, clean up existing pages, and make sure the procedures are up-to-date

Submit translations

How can I become an Arch developer?

Usually, new developers are picked by the existing developers as the workload increases. Sometimes they post a position and you can apply to fill it, but more often, they just invite somebody they know would be good at it and would fit in well with the rest of the team. Having a portfolio of Arch contributions is the best way to make it on the team.

As an artist...

Feel free to share wallpapers, splash screens, color palettes, widgets, themes, etc. with the community on the forum.